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Despite my disdain for the costs of owning a car, I find myself in a familiar situation…looking for a new car. This time, it isn’t a replacement for my dented Toyota Camry. Instead, my wife is looking for a new car. With the prospect of having a family being in the not so distant future, we are looking to upgrade my wife’s Honda Civic to an SUV. This article will summarize some of the discussions my wife and I had about car ownership along with discussing our final options that we are looking to purchase.

With 2016 coming to a close and New Years rapidly approaching, we are running out of time to publish our 2017 goals so that we can hit the ground running on January 1st and sprint towards the finish line. If you haven’t noticed, the two of us have spent a lot of time thinking about taking the right approach to the goal setting process. We are not aiming to cross a low bar here on this website. Instead, we have taken months to find purpose driven goals that are challenging and are going to push us. Will it be comfortable achieving all of these goals…no! But is that really the point of the goal setting process? We want to sweat, we want to force ourselves to scrape every dollar together….we want to feel the burn. Man, I’m starting to sound like Lanny here. After a month of brainstorming, number crunching, and debates, here they are, my five 2017 goals!

Each day I watch the stock market in awe. At 4 PM EST, I read a headline like “Stock Market Sets New Record” and when I log online in the morning I am reading an article about how the market is up in the pre-market once again. By the end of the day, it is like de ja vu and I start the process all over again. This market makes finding stocks the meet our stock screener difficult, how could it not? Well, I have been thinking a lot about where I want to allocate my capital recently and what I want my next move to be. After doing some research on various blogs, including some articles written by my fellow Diplomat, I find myself considering the option that the title of the article outlines. Is now the time to accelerate the payments on my student loans?

Now that the year of 2016 is wrapping up and we are only around 4-5 weeks away until we ring in the new year, I have been deeply thinking about my extra-mortgage payment paydown strategy. Mortgage interest rates have been sky rocketing since the election, another element to showcase the rollercoaster ride that we are truly on. This has caused me to potentially make a tweak or two to my strategy that I have had in play for the last few years. Let’s see what I mean!

Student Loans….a topic that almost everyone can relate to and almost every person in the personal finance community curse. We’ve all read the reports and the numbers are staggering: total student loans are over $1 trillion dollars here in the US and the average graduate is leaving school with an average of $37,712 (Source: Student Loan Hero). My goal today is to discuss my family’s student loan situation, some of the tough discussions we had before incurring the student loans, and then to cap it off, my plan to pay off our debt as early as possible.

Last weekend, my wife and I met with a real estate agent to initiate the first step of buying our first house! In the past, I have written about how we are in no hurry to purchase a house, take on a mortgage, and begin incurring all the extra expenses that we hear about from friends and family. But, we anticipate the home buying process to be a lengthy process for us as we carefully vet our options to find that perfect house. This article will be a different style and format that I have had in the past, because I would love to leave it open-ended for a discussion and hear from as many people as possible about this topic. So please, at the end, share your experience/story!

My fiance and I have been joking around about this (well, mostly me) recently. When you talk about your wedding with your friends and family, there seems to be three questions that always enter the conversation. Where is your honeymoon? When are you having a baby? And when are you going to buy a house? I love the questions and have a great time talking about them. I just think it is funny how they always seem to come up! I’m sure most of you out there that have gotten married know exactly what I am talking about. The first two are easy answers, and unlike DivHut, you won’t be reading about a Baby Diplomat dividend growth investing fund anytime soon. The purpose of this article is to focus on point number three, when are we going to buy a house? I spoiled the suspense with the title of the article, so let’s take a look into why we are in no hurry to purchase a house after our wedding.